Success or Snub? The Greatest Show on Earth (25th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

  To see part 1, click here.

Broadway Melody Ballet~Gene Kelly and the MGM Orchestra - Singin' in the Rain

The 25th Academy Awards marked the quarter-century anniversary of this ceremony so they decided to provide a couple updates to adapt to changing times. This was the first ceremony to be broadcast on television as well as the first ceremony to be held in New York City and Hollywood simultaneously, a trend that would continue until 1957.

How do you host an Academy Awards ceremony on opposite sides of the country simultaneously? It was done using the television to bridge the gap between the parties in the editing booth. The master of ceremonies would speak to the audience directly and then, depending on the award, they would cut to either the New York arena where the host (Fredric March this year) would read off the nominees and winners or cut to the LA arena where that city’s host (Bob Hope) would do the same.

Credit where it’s due, this is a pretty innovative way to embrace a new technology for a live show as well as a fairly cost-efficient way of letting New York-based film folks not feel pressure to fly all the way across the country just for the Academy Awards. In fact, since many of them also worked on Broadway and the show began at 10pm, actors and stagehands were literally going to the ceremony still wearing make-up from their day job. This idea would be shelved in 1957 as putting it on was a nightmare for the early days of television and really pushed the people making it to the brink, so much so that the Academy would vote to just return to a single-venue event.

As television continued to eat into Hollywood’s profits, studios had to keep coming up with things to draw people to the theaters. Something that you would not get at home. The solution was a new process called Cinerama, demonstrated in the aptly-titled This Is Cinerama.

Cinerama was a process that would introduce the concept of the viewers’ peripheral vision into the movies, making the screens so much bigger than what you could see at home. In plain English, this was the start of commercial widescreen. The “documentary” This Is Cinerama is largely just panoramic shots of beautiful vistas to show off the new technology. (Considering how excited and self-satisfied the studio barons seemed by this new breakthrough, I’m kinda surprised this didn’t get nominated for the Oscar.) It’s not worth watching but it is worth acknowledging because it shows a pretty good microcosm of where exactly the industry barons’ minds were at the time. The industry wanted stuff bigger and they wanted it larger and they wanted the movies to damn near pop off the screen until the line between the theater and the screen became a blur.

This would do a lot to explain why The Greatest Show on Earth won the Academy Award for Best Picture (partially, we’ll get to the other reason in due time). The biggest competitors, and other nominees for Best Picture, were John Ford’s The Quiet Man

an even-back-then-sexist tale of an American living in Ireland although it is one of Ford’s more entertaining movies; Ivanhoe

a movie with a pretty good scale but a forgettable story and involving the main character making some pretty dumb decisions; and Moulin Rouge

which is probably the best of these three movies with its love letter to burlesque theater and beautiful cinematography though it’s still not quite movie of the year level (although it was a severe snub for Best Color Cinematography, an award it wasn’t even nominated for). While all of these movies are big and epic, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re great.

Somewhat smaller films were largely forgotten about by the Academy because, as we’ve come to learn, the Academy Awards are less about what is actually the best film so much as what Hollywood wants to advertise as their best film. And, yes, quite a few smaller/medium-budget movies came out this year to remind us all that size isn’t always everything.

Aside from The Greatest Show on Earth, the biggest winner of the night was The Bad and the Beautiful

which took home 5 Oscars (Best Black-and-White Costume Design, Best Black-and-White Cinematography, Best Black-and-White Art Direction, Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress for Gloria Grahame), setting a record for the most Academy Awards won by a film to not have been nominated for Best Picture. The movie acts as a morality tale as it revolves around the rise of a Hollywood producer, Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas), who alienates everyone he meets.

This is one of the first movies to actually be willing to take the nickel out of the parasitic scumbags that we like to call Hollywood producers (who responded exactly how you would expect them to, by hiring lawyers to comb through the film for anything that could be considered libel). The film naturally invites some comparisons to Citizen Kane (1941) and comparing the two does show a few key areas where The Bad and the Beautiful falls flat. The film gets lost in a few subplots and does ultimately try to justify Shields’ bad behavior which really sucks the wind out of the whole “making a movie showing the dark side of show business” thing. Still, at the end of the day, it is a good movie and a better movie about show business than The Greatest Show on Earth.

Another noteworthy record was Shirley Booth being the last person born during the nineteenth century to win an Academy Award for her performance in the very excellent Come Back, Little Sheba.

Despite initially seeming like Oscar bait, Come Back, Little Sheba is a very grim portrayal of a dying marriage with interesting commentary on societal pressures between masculinity and femininity. As I’m sure you know, many movies back then were based off Broadway plays with the studios often offering sweetheart deals to the stars of these plays to try to make the leap to film. Some took off afterwards with huge careers (i.e. Orson Welles) while others ended up in one-and-dones (i.e. Monty Woolley). The problem with a lot of these movies is that they don’t always make the transition to film too well as many directors will often literally shoot the play.

Come Back, Little Sheba is a great example of a movie making the jump very well. The lighting changes, they have great close-ups and the movie doesn’t shy away from going to a dark place. And, yes, Booth does give the performance of a lifetime here. Looking back at the immediate postwar period where the Oscar winners were all films with social commentary, that makes it stick out even more that a movie like Come Back, Little Sheba was snubbed for everything besides the Best Actress award.

Equally good and equally snubbed was Japanese War Bride.

The title should answer everything you need to know about the plot. A soldier named Captain Sterling (Don Taylor) marries a Japanese woman named Tae Shimizu (Shirley Yamaguchi) and invites her to come home to meet his family. Upon arrival, however, the family ends up treating her horribly. The film is a good parable on racism towards Asian-Americans, being especially timely since this was less than 10 years after many Americans of Japanese descent were unjustly forced into internment camps during World War II. As civil rights became more and more a part of the discourse, more movies about hatred would become commonplace. Most famous were many black-led films but there were numerous films about Asian hatred that spun off from Japanese War Bride’s success as well (e.g. Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), Sayonara (1957)).

While this was progress, pretty much all of these films haven’t aged in the most progressive manner as they’re a prime example of the white savior trope. Both Japanese War Bride and all the films listed above revolve around white characters who stand up for the Asian characters who are seldom given any agency. This doesn’t really ruin the movie nor is it that noticeable with this specific set-up but it can be noticed when you look at the trend of films as a whole. Still, Japanese War Bride should deserve credit as it allows Shirley Yamaguchi to give an actually dignified performance and broke a filmmaking taboo by showing interracial marriage.

There were a couple great foreign films that were also given no acknowledgment. From England, there was The Lavender Hill Mob.

Along with The Asphalt Jungle (1950), this is one of the earliest pioneers of the heist movie genre with the climatic car chase hooking audiences to their seats back when it first came out.

From Italy, there was Francesco, Giullare di Dio (Eng.: The Flowers of St. Francis).

An episodic compilation about the esteemed St. Francis of Assisi (Brother Nazario Gerardi) and his band of monks. While nowadays regarded very highly, the movie was not well-received at the time, in Italy or America. Partly because of changing attitudes as Italy was steadily climbing out of the post-war devastation, partly because of the movie’s pretty laughable budget.

Also from Italy was Roberto Rossellini’s L’Amore.

This is another episodic film from Rossellini (the same man who made Paisá (Eng.: Paisan) (1946)) and not one of his stronger ones as there’s only two stories this time and their thematic relationship comes off as tenuous. This movie is important, however, for its mark on film history. Specifically, it was banned in the state of New York for blasphemy (one of the stories involves the main character (Anna Magnani) being mistaken for the Virgin Mary). The distributors of the film sued the censors and the case eventually landed in front of the Supreme Court who overturned the ban, establishing that film expression was covered by the First Amendment and, thus, states had no right to issue blanket bans on movies (the court case in question was Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson if you would like to read more details). This would be the first major chink in the armor of the Hays Code and other old-school censors that would only grow bigger and bigger throughout the 1950s.

But the best of the foreign movies this year was the French film, Jeux Interdits (Eng.: Forbidden Games),

which won an Honorary Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Forbidden Games is an uncomfortably grim movie about 5-year-old Paulette (Brigitte Fossey) who sees her parents (Roger Fossey and Marcelle Feuillade) killed in front of her during the German occupation of France. Freeing into the French countryside, Paulette is taken in by the Dollé family and hits it off with their 10-year-old son, Michel (Georges Poujouly). The two quickly become friends and start to cope with the constant death and destruction by stealing crosses from local cemeteries to honor their friends, from Paulette’s parents to the dead cockroaches they find.

This is one of the best and most unconventional war movies ever made. While showing the death and waste of war was nothing new, even back then, it’s a very compelling look at just how much war messes up children psychologically. Paulette is clearly too young to even comprehend death but is still traumatized and doesn’t have any adults in her life who will actually help her tackle these problems (the rest of the Dollé family and their community do not take the game in question very well). Anyone who’s been around young children can relate to this line of thinking that leads her to start grave robbing and violating these Christian taboos.

With the possible exception of The Bad and the Beautiful, these are all very excellent films and present much stronger and more mature themes than The Greatest Show on Earth in very persuasive manners. But, as mentioned, Hollywood wanted to go big that year. So maybe if we’re looking for a proper snub, we should look for another big-budget blockbuster film? Well, you don’t have to look far to find one of the most famous and biggest musicals at the time, Singin’ in the Rain.

We mentioned last time how this movie spun off from Gene Kelly’s last movie, An American in Paris (1951), and improved upon most of its flaws. While An American in Paris was a send-up to a lot of Jazz Age tropes, Singin’ in the Rain is a celebration of cinema itself. The movie is set in the late 20s, detailing the trials and tribulations of movie star Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly). Specifically, the movie is set against the backdrop of the rise of talking pictures and how the average life of a movie star is changed by this technological breakthrough. The B-plot is also him falling in love with a theater actress named Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) who is dismissive towards movies as an inferior art form.

I feel like there’s a bit more going under the surface here than in An American in Paris that helps make it the superior movie (well, that, and the fact that Kelly and Reynolds actually have romantic chemistry with each other). Singin’ in the Rain is nominally a satire about the fragile egos that make up Hollywood but also has some ruminations about the maturation of cinema as an art form. The whole arc of the movie revolves around a movie star trying to earn the respect of the theater actress as an equal while the greedy powers-that-be in Hollywood try to literally steal Kathy’s talent. The fact that it’s named after a Broadway song that got famous right around the same time that talkies came out adds the cherry on top to what is essentially a darling love letter to the Roaring 20s. (As you will soon find out, decades nostalgia isn’t anything new. Just like how movies today are obsessed with the 90s; movies in the 2010s were obsessed with the 80s, movies in the 80s were obsessed with the 50s and movies in the 50s were obsessed with the 20s.)

Ignoring that, though, this movie is just straight-up fun. Singin’ in the Rain could very well be the best musical of the Golden Age of Hollywood. The songs are all catchy and memorable, Gene Kelly’s dance choreography is on fire here, they have another incredible 17-minute-long sequence, the movie is actually funny and all the characters are great. I especially love Donald O’Connor as Lockwood’s best friend/sidekick, Cosmo Brown. Watch this scene where they make a song out of harassing Lockwood’s diction coach (Bobby Watson) and look how quickly his facial expressions change and how he can actually keep up with Gene Kelly.

In terms of what is probably the most recognizable and classic film of 1952, Singin’ in the Rain walks away with that title. This is one of those choices like Citizen Kane (1941) or King Kong (1933) where the movie is such a legendary piece of cinematic history that it’s actually stunning that it didn’t win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Though this still isn’t the feature presentation. The real snub here, and the movie that everyone thought would’ve won the Oscar back in 1952, was the groundbreaking Western, High Noon.

It’s 10:45 am and Will Kane (Gary Cooper), the recently-married, recently-retired marshal of a frontier town, has just gotten word that a criminal that he locked up named Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald) has gotten out of prison. What’s more, Miller will be arriving on the 12 o’clock noon train with his gang for the specific intention of having his revenge on Kane. Realizing that that is just over an hour away, Kane decides to come back for one last shootout and begins going around town to build a posse that’ll be ready to capture Miller when he pulls in. The only problem is that no one in town seems to be interested in helping Kane, telling him to flee town or to figure it out himself.

That’s the whole film: just an incredibly suspenseful doomsday clock as we see our hero systematically go to each and every single person in town to ask for their help and receiving nothing but rejections. High Noon is Hitchcockian with how methodical it shows Kane’s plight. The movie is shot in what is almost real time and each new location has a clock somewhere on camera. You never forget the time and as it gets closer and closer to high noon, you feel increasingly desperate, hoping that someone will finally help Marshal Kane.

What makes it so excellent is that, despite the simple plot, there seems to be a lot unsaid that gives the film depth. Whereas most Westerns are usually slow, plodding and showing off beautiful locations, High Noon is a movie that is just about the one part that the audience always looks forward to: the shootout. By focusing on the hour leading up to the shootout, we sense that there’s an entire 2-hour-long Western hidden somewhere just off-camera. With each character that Kane encounters, we get literal years of history between them but it’s all unstated. For example, one of the major characters is a former girlfriend (Katy Jurado) who has a romantic history with both Kane and Miller. That sounds like it could be the entire plot of its own melodramatic Western but, here, it’s just backstory, there’s a shootout about to happen! Keeping it all unsaid allows the audience to fill in the gaps themselves and keeps them that much more interested.

High Noon was highly controversial when it came out, primarily because of the Western having the unofficial title of the most American of genres. The history of the American frontier was defined by these hardy men and women who would build towns and always have each other’s back, especially when something dangerous rolled through. Showing a community reject its beloved leader, not out of malice but because of cowardice and convenience, was completely antithetical to that whole ideal. Many people in Hollywood said that the film was inflammatory and trying to imply that American values were being undermined. High Noon’s screenwriter, Carl Foreman, who was a former member of the American Communist Party and soon-to-be-member of the Hollywood Blacklist, responded with what amounted to a pretty resounding, “No shit, Sherlock.”

Despite the movie receiving rave reviews by both audiences and critics, High Noon was heavily savaged in conservative movie circles, particularly by Hollywood’s own (self-appointed) embodiment of Western masculinity, John Wayne. Instead of taking the movie at face value and using it as a vehicle to re-examine their own thoughts and prejudices, this film was absolutely reamed by many of the Hollywood conservative circles such as Wayne, Howard Hawks, DeMille etc. (The exception being Ronald Reagan who considered it his personal favorite movie.) Foreman would end up getting run out of the country and High Noon would live in most of these people’s heads rent-free, so much so that Wayne and Hawks would make Rio Bravo (1959) as a specific response to High Noon to show a “real American” Western. (Whereas in High Noon, the sheriff wants help and is rejected, in Rio Bravo, Wayne’s sheriff is so manly that he refuses aid but his friends help him anyway; it’s one of Wayne’s most entertaining films though please don’t take the very unhealthy moral and casual racism at face value).

Watching High Noon again after reading the story about the making-of and its reception, it’s pretty surprising how the film isn’t as scathing as you would think. The movie is 100% allegorical. There are no speeches or winks to the camera about contemporary politics, it’s all unstated. In fact, the film’s director, Fred Zinnemann, personally disagreed that the film was inherently political as he saw it instead about the importance of one man standing up for what is right, regardless of outside pressure. If that shouldn’t be enough to dispel the belief that the movie is un-American, the Soviet Union blacklisted the movie, saying that it is too much about the triumph of the individual.

Going into the 25th Academy Awards, High Noon was the odds-on favorite to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Even back then, The Greatest Show on Earth’s victory was considered a gigantic upset. High Noon was considered the strong frontrunner (not to mention the only frontrunner that was under 2 hours long), being nominated for 3 awards (Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay) and winning 4 for Best Film Editing, Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role for Gary Cooper and Best Song for the classic and oft-parodied “The Ballad of High Noon” which started the trend of Westerns opening with original songs going forward.

Anyone who's ever seen Blazing Saddles (1974) is likely to scoff at this scene but, at the time, this was one of the most haunting movie intros.

These are well-deserved, particularly Gary Cooper’s victory as he’s the glue that holds the movie together. Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Kane is one of those iconic movie roles that you cannot imagine anyone else performing. He brings a grizzled feel to Kane that makes it clear that this is a man who’s seen some problems and is probably deep down terrified and depressed but will soldier on because he knows it’s right. No one else at the time would have been able to pull this off. Cooper comes off as more grizzled and confident than, say, James Stewart but also more quietly afraid and desperate than, say, John Wayne. There’s a lot going on with this dude but it all simmers behind his stone-faced surface.

Luckily for Wayne, Cooper ended up having to skive off the night of the awards and asked Wayne to accept it on his behalf. Wayne who, again, genuinely despised High Noon and everything it stood for, wasn’t going to let some good old-fashioned political principles stand in his way of lovingly caressing that glitzy statue to some applause and was more than happy to oblige. During his acceptance speech, he even mentioned how jealous of Cooper he was that he didn’t get to play Marshal Will Kane and threatened to fire his agent for not getting him the role. So either John Wayne was a hypocrite or… yeah, there actually isn’t really an alternative here, is there?

All the goodwill and acknowledgment of being a great movie on the planet wouldn’t let the Hollywood producers allow something like High Noon to actually win the Academy Award for Best Picture, especially since it was made by one of the B-studios. But if we’re disqualifying High Noon for political purposes, then why give the win to The Greatest Show on Earth specifically? As we’ve seen, there were plenty of other excellent movies to come out that year. Singin’ in the Rain was amazing and Japanese War Bride, Forbidden Games and Come Back, Little Sheba are all great as well. There’s a couple reasons for this, and none of them are good ones.

As mentioned, Gene Kelly already won the big award the previous year so Singin’ in the Rain was more or less disqualified since it would seem socially inappropriate to let him win 2 years in a row. This is a terrible way to judge cinema but a great way to increase social clout in a popularity contest. As for The Greatest Show on Earth, DeMille was Hollywood royalty, had never won the Academy Award for Best Picture and was over 70 years old by this point. He was clearly not going to live for much longer so it, again, seemed socially appropriate to give him one before he shuffled off the mortal coil, regardless of the quality of the film in question.

But there’s a slightly more, for lack of a better word, sinister reason. The Hollywood Blacklist was born out of a very heated and almost violent meeting of the Director’s Guild of America that went on for, no exaggeration, almost 15 hours as the different factions in Hollywood eventually kowtowed and agreed to abide by the Blacklist. Friendly reminder that, at this time in history, Hollywood had a total monopoly over the American film industry. At the very least today, independent and online filmmaking is strong enough that if you’re ostracized from the film industry, you could potentially find work again. Back then, if you were blacklisted for having political opinions that were against-type, your life was ruined for all intents and purposes. Want to take a guess as to which director’s idea it was to found the Blacklist? I’ll give you a hint, it’s the same guy whose victory would be a tacit approval of the Blacklist and everything it stood for.

The whole HUAC and Blacklist saga is one of the ugliest episodes in Hollywood history and this decision is one of the crystal-clear examples of what this blog series is meant to shine light on. The Greatest Show on Earth did not win the Academy Award for Best Picture because of its artistic merits or because it was such a crowd-pleaser or because it invented and/or perfected some filmmaking techniques. It won because of messed-up studio politics (not to mention actual politics) as well as a bunch of control freaks who wouldn’t dare tolerate filmmakers who thought differently than them and challenged their way of thinking, regardless of the high quality of the film in question.

Calling The Greatest Show on Earth the best movie of 1952 was a…

SNUB!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1951:

• Come Back, Little Sheba (dir. Daniel Mann)
• Francesco, Giullare di Dio (The Flowers of St. Francis) (dir. Roberto Rossellini)
• High Noon (dir. Fred Zinnemann)
• Japanese War Bride (dir. King Vidor)
• Jeux Interdits (Forbidden Games) (dir. Réné Clément)
• Moulin Rouge (dir. John Huston)
• Singin' in the Rain (dir. Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen)
• The Crimson Pirate (dir. Robert Siodmak)
• The Lavender Hill Mob (dir. Charles Crichton)
• The Quiet Man (dir. John Ford)

Favorite Heroes:

• Brother Francis of Assisi (Brother Nezario Gerardi) (Francesco, Giullare di Dio (The Flowers of St. Francis))
• Brother Ginepro (Brother Severino Pisacane) (Francesco, Giullare di Dio (The Flowers of St. Francis))
• Buttons (James Stewart) (The Greatest Show on Earth)
• Captain Jim Sterling (Don Taylor) (Japanese War Bride)
• Captain Vallo/The Crimson Pirate (Burt Lancaster) (The Crimson Pirate)
• Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) (Singin' in the Rain)
• General Emiliano Zapata (Marlon Brando) (Viva Zapata!)
• Lola Delaney (Shirley Booth) (Come Back, Little Sheba)
• Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) (High Noon)
• Sean Thornton (John Wayne) (The Quiet Man)

Favorite Villains:

• Baron Gruda (Leslie Bradley) (The Crimson Pirate)
• Doc Delaney (Burt Lancaster) (Come Back, Little Sheba)
• Fran Sterling (Marie Windsor) (Japanese War Bride)
• General Victoriano Huerta (Frank Silvera) (Viva Zapata!)
• Henry "Dutch" Holland and Al Pendlebury (Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway) (The Lavender Hill Mob)
• Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) (The Bad and the Beautiful)
• Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) (Singin' in the Rain)
• Marie Charlet (Colette Marchand) (Moulin Rouge)
• Max Fabian (Alexander Scourby) (Affair in Trinidad)
• Red Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen) (The Quiet Man)